For those of you considering publishing or have published e-books, especially on Amazon, I have a little bit of advice; advertise.

When I initially threw my hat into the kindle arena I had a few misguided theories about the way things would work. I figured I would put my book on Amazon, write a blog here and everything would work out fine; word of mouth would spread, and books will fly off the shelves.

It didn't quite happen that way.

Late last month, as I saw my sales take a dip, I decided to look into advertising on some of those sites designed just for Kindle. Boy am I glad that I did. I put out three ads, but only one has run so far, but the numbers speak for themselves. I've already outsold my best month by over 200 books and I get 2 weeks left to go. I will only speak of the first place that I went to FKbooksandtips.com I placed a 25 dollar ad (meaning I had to price my book at .99 cents, it cost 50 dollars if I price at 2.99) This wasn't the cheapest site, but the first date i could get available. Things paid off big. For one. During the sale I sold 300 copies of God Bless the Child, got my book ranked #2 in its genre (and it was a bigger genre not one of those real obscure ones) next to the book Wonder. I also broke into the top 100 author list for psychological thrillers (which is where Amazon places me).

But the initial boost in sales wasn't all. I am seeing increased sales across the board still. Selling over 20 books a day and have sold over 700 total books this month.

So what does this mean?

1. It means that transgender fiction is viable to the mainstream market
2. That there is money to be made if you invest in yourself.
3. You put out a professional product and you will be rewarded.

With that comes a little bit of a caveat that goes for BC readers as well and a call to authors who publish on the kindle.

A lot of places that will advertise your book require that you have so many reviews (usually 10, give or take). Only 3 of my books fit that criteria (out of 12). Now, I know a lot of readers here have Amazon accounts. It would be helpful and supportive if you left reviews on books on Amazon.

That said. Authors. If you want to sell your books, you have to give away some for free. All of my books on Amazon are available here on BC except for God Bless the Child (soon to be remedied). Anyone can read the book here and even if they didn't want to buy it, as long as they bought ANYTHING from Amazon, they could write a review on my book. I would very much like it if authors who produce longer works made them available on BC for reviews, but I don't know if anyone else does it.

If we, as a community, are going to make transsexualism socially acceptable, we need the mainstream public to see us in a positive light. Books can do that if they have the support.

Thank you.